Why Silverlight?

[AnnieCahill]

Hi everyone,

All day I have been researching the pros and cons of Flex vs. Silverlight.  Inside I am more inclined to go with Silverlight since I had a VB.Net class a couple of years ago, and from what I understand Silverlight is more powerful.  However, I stumbled across some recent websites saying that Silverlight will be "dead" in the near future. 

I am just trying to figure out the best direction to go.  I like the ability to do more customization, but obviously the pending obituaries for Silverlight are making me want to hold off for a while longer.

Is ESRI going toward one more than the other?  Not that long ago, .Net was big in Desktop but now it seems Python is the way to go and .Net has fallen by the wayside.  I just don't want to start a huge project in something that may not be supported or continued to be developed in the next few years.

Thanks for all your input.

AC

[RichardWatson]

This is an issue which you will not get a clear answer for.

Some people choose based on whether they like Microsoft or Adobe more.

Some people choose based on whatever is the currently popular rumor.  The death of Silverlight has not been announced.  Most people expect further insight on this topic at the Microsoft Build conference in September.  It is hard for me to imagine that Microsoft will abandon this.

We went through the same struggle and chose Silverlight because we are a Microsoft development shop.  Our .NET skills and code largely move directly over to Silverlight which saves us both time and money.  We also believe that the skills we learned from Silverlight (e.g. XAML and asynchronous programming) will serve us well on desktop.

I think that both Flex and JavaScript are also fine choices.  Flex because it is very popular and JavaScript because it is closer to the core.

[dotMorten_esri]

Let me put it plainly: Silverlight is NOT dead, and is NOT dying (how's that for being clear? :-).
People tend to read the wrong into Microsoft announcements, instead of reading what is actually being said, and why the focus at that particular event was on something else. They were VERY clear that existing apps will continue to run on Windows 8 (and why this is an issue with Silverlight on Windows 8 is beyond me because Silverlight is mainly a browser-plugin and not a desktop app framework).

This is also a good post to read on speculations on what's to be announced at the Build conference: http://davidburela.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/premature-cries-of-silverlight-wpf-skill-loss-windows-8-...

And that's just all about the UI Platform. The .NET Framework is such a core feature of Windows now, that the OS couldn't even live without it. So betting on .NET is not a poor choice.

[AnnieCahill]

Thanks so much for your replies.  I know that the "death threats" are premature and it seems like each person has something different to say about it.  I have kind of a head start with .Net programming which is why I was looking in that direction.  Our webmaster suggested Adobe since more people have Flash already installed, but at the end of the day I don't really see that as a huge problem.

Another quick question-a while back I heard that there was no Print feature in Silverlight.  Is this still the case?

Thanks again for your insight.

Annie

[KeithGanzenmuller]

Silverlight does now have print functionality, it just isn't very good.
I had a heck of a time getting any consistent output from it.
In the end you would be better off going this route http://silverpdf.codeplex.com/  and http://imagetools.codeplex.com/.
Lots of information about those two can be found in these forums, for me, I used the imagetools to convert my map, legends, scalebar and north arrow, then silverpdf to place them on a portrait or landscape pdf.
Take the time to figure that out and you will be miles ahead producing printer-independent output. I'm a novice at this but I was able to figure it out based on the comments on the two sites.

KG